There are a number of soap dispensers commercially available some of which are wall mounted and include a base adapted to be mounted against a wall or other vertical surface and a cover. The covers are generally hinged to the mounting base and so as to be capable of swinging to an open position to permit loading into the dispenser and to a closed and locked position for operation. In that regard, the soap is often sold in replaceable containers such as collapsible bags with a dispensing tube extending therefrom and having a dispensing nozzle on the projecting end.
Examples of such dispensers can be seen in Potter U.S. Pat. No. 4,715,517, Lippman U.S. Pat. No. 4,765,515 and Kanfer U.S. Pat. No. 4,621,749. This prior art discloses dispensers in which a push bar is secured either to the cover or to the base member so that upon engagement and actuation of the push bar by the hand of the user the dispensing tube containing the soap is collapsed so as to eject a predetermined portion through the dispensing nozzle at the end of the tube onto the hand of the user.
Another dispenser in this field can be seen in Kanfer U.S. Pat. No. 4,582,227 which discloses a pump type soap dispenser.
There are also a number of various material dispensers available which are configured with a counting apparatus. These counting dispensers provide a numerical indication of the number of times the material dispenser has been activated.
Examples of such dispensers can be seen in Morrone U.S. Pat. No. 3,606,084, Chapman U.S. Pat. No. 3,119,557, Lyall U.S. Pat. No. 4,188,984, Smith U.S. Pat. No. 4,774,916 and Reilly U.S. Pat. No. 4,265,370. This prior art discloses various material dispensers in which a counter mechanism is communicative with an activator so that upon engagement thereof, the counter records that actuation.
All of the aforementioned soap dispensers are commonly located and used in many different environments. Particularly, however, they are often used in a hospital or restaurant setting wherein sanitation is of prime importance.
Various regulatory bodies have determined through experience that on average these sanitary requirements can be met if a predetermined number of hand washings per employee occur during a predetermined period of time such as an hour, a shift, etc. Thus, for example, if two parties are involved and the desired number of hand washings on average is ten per hour, the total number of hand washes involving the particular dispenser in an hour would be twenty.
The difficulty involved in measuring compliance with these various regulations and aspirational goals is that the user will often "pump" the dispenser. In other words, the user will often engage the push bar with his or her hand and depress it partially or fully and then maintain hand contact and repeat the depression movement several times. Therefore, if one is to simply measure the number of times that the pressure bar or push bar moves, one would record a number of hand washings in such an instance that would be, in fact, inaccurate.
An example of a dispenser that measures the actual number of dispensing events is seen in Schroeder U.S. Pat. No. 5,370,267. This dispenser records a dispensing event only after a resilient member, which is depressed by an activator, returns to its original state. Unfortunately, the resiliency of the resilient member changes appreciably after extended use. As such, the variation in the return time of the resilient member may result in multiple dispensing events only being counted as one dispensing event.
Therefore, it has become apparent that it is desirable to increment a counter with a consistent and repeatable predetermined delay time, prior to the next actuation of the counter, so that multiple dispensing events are not classified as a single dispensing event.